I became involved with prison work in the early 1980s and came from a background of activism. A fellow activist once told me, ‘if you wanted to do real activism work with black people you needed to start with the prison because that’s where most of us were. I started writing to prisoners and then began setting up arts-based residencies in prisons. The turning point came in the mid-eighties when he was asked to run a residency with a group of black prisoners in Long Lartin, a Category ‘A’ prison in Evesham.
Although I hadn’t gone to prisons to deal with the arts but rather ‘to engage black men’, this residency introduced me to the need for transformative experiences for black men in prison and the role of the arts in providing these. ‘It started off as a discussion around black history, black politics, and revolutionary theories and then translated into them expressing and exploring themselves through creativity. So for the first time, black men felt a sense of freedom, felt their experiences were being validated… for guys who couldn’t read or write, poetry and performance became a vehicle for them to explore who they were.
The next milestone in my work with black prisoners came when the late Anne Peaker suggested that I use the Unit (later named the Anne Peaker Centre) to articulate the voice of black prisoners. With a group of artists, I developed and delivered a project called Nuff Respect, which looked at the creative and rehabilitative needs of black prisoners. Over the following years I regularly delivered projects specifically for black prisoners through the Anne Peaker Centre and the National Black Prisoners Support Project.
My workshop approach would involve group bonding, the participatory definition of a brief, providing an inventory of creative workshops, teaching from a point of prior knowledge (so that poetry can begin with hip hop and grime) and teaching by example. Driven by the possibilities of engagement and transformation, I adapted his approach in each situation to maximise these possibilities. ‘I didn’t have a methodology, I just knew that I was engaging black men and whatever I was doing was working. There was no evaluation then, no real academic context to what I was doing, I just knew it worked. My approach at that time was difficult to categorise. My methods spread broadly across the range from arts to therapy, while their application is immediate and context specific. My work is also underpinned by structures and templates of understanding that are familiar to the men with whom I worked.
I would describe an ideal structure as ‘culturally competent, embracing cultural forms of creativity… validating those cultural forms as a viable form of expression’. In co facilitators, he looks for those who are culturally competent in their own spheres. In order to create a safe space in which transformation can occur, they need to be able to build credibility through shared humour and their real, lived, common experiences. As Chris Johnston has pointed out, structure is not value free. Although my work is based on shared societal and cultural values, they reflect my personal values too. I favour using traditional wisdom, for example, as a basis for Interpretation of reality. The Sankofa bird, after which my company is named, is an African bird with its head facing backwards. It symbolises going back and retrieving,’ So I go back and search for wisdom and bring that as the foundation for interpreting social reality’.
I see the creative process as part of a wider developmental process concerned with rites of passage. I have developed a range of projects around fatherhood, masculinity and rites of passage using black history and performance as the tool. I also use African-centred performance, not in its purest sense but rather in terms of favouring the non-linear tradition, the aural tradition and ritualised performance. So I use the creative process to engage them in a process of self-definition, outside of their social label.’
As a part of doing this, I create notions of ritual that involves sitting in a circle with a stone in the centre. Each person picks the stone up in the morning and affirms something they would like to get from that day. Every evening, they repeat the process, stating what it was that they received. The stone is said to contain memory, and so they may dedicate thoughts or actions through the stone to people who are not there. They may go into the centre of the circle and pray. The ritual is about finding what works the best for them, about establishing meaning and purpose in their days and lives. In conclusion, my work now interweaves the personal and political concerns specific to black men informed by my understanding of criminology, psychology and creative processess.’
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